Rossi on Home Depot — Talks, No Agreement

Apparently Andrea Rossi has got a lot of attention with his remark about being in talks with Home Depot — and probably Home Depot has been hearing about this too, and it may not have been welcome attention from their point of view given the controversies surrounding the E-Cat and LENR/Cold Fusion in general. I’m sure Home Depot won’t be making any public statement or clarification about any contact with Rossi. Today Rossi posted the following regarding the situation:

Andrea Rossi
January 5th, 2012 at 4:27 AM

Dear Alex:
IMPORTANT: WE DID NOT REACH ANY AGREEMENT WITH HOME DEPOT YET!!! WE ARE IN TALKS WITH THEM. MANY ISSUES HAVE TO BE RESOLVED YET. CERTIFICATION, OF COURSE, MUST BE COMPLETED BEFORE WE SELL OUR E-CATS. OF COURSE WE ARE IN DISCUSSIONS ALSO WITH OTHER ORGANIZATIONS.
Warm Regards,
A.R.

Rossi uses the all caps method of posting when he really wants to emphasize something, so it must be important to him to get the story straight on this. Maybe he regrets saying anything about the situation on the Cash Flow radio interview. As he goes about trying to build up a production and distribution network for the E-Cat, it is hardly surprising that Rossi should be contacting large retailers. It’s very likely that any conversations he is having with them at this stage are very preliminary. He won’t strike any deals with any retailer until he can demonstrate that he has a safe, reliable and working device.

What “certification”? The only one I know of is Underwriter’s Lab (or its counter part in other markets), but the UL cert is not legally required to sell products. In any case, UL is only interested in safety, ie, electric shock, fire, explosion, etc hazards. Not whether it really works as advertised. Others are watching for that, and their hammer comes down in the after market.

Outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing. No need to make his own plant from the scratch. In this slump there is a lot of idlling metal-working plants ready to accept an order for hundreds of thousands of devices. There is nothing very special about them; the only component that has to be produced separatelly is the nickel power cum catalyst. A million pieces in a very short time is obviously quite doable.

arian

#
Andrea Rossi
January 6th, 2012 at 11:42 AM

Dear K. Dobrolecki:
We must make a distinction between the price of the industrial plants and the price of the domestic plants.
For the industrial plants ( the 1 MW plants) the price from 2012 will be around 1,500.00 US$/kW, moreless 10%.
The domestic E-Cats of 10 kW will be manufactured with a different technology and with a very good economy scale, due to the fact that we have started the production of 1 million pieces; such scale, obviously, will reduce by an order of magnitude the costs. If all goes as I hope and as I am working for, the 10 kW E-Cats will cost between 100 and 150 US$/kW. This fact will:
1- allow to everybody to buy an E-Cat
2- cancel the competition
The reverse engineering will be, I think, impossible, due to a system we invented for this purpose, but even if somebody will succeed to do it, it will anyway be impossible for him to compete economically. The 1 MW plants have a totally different technology and engineering.
Warm Regards,
A.R.

admin

Thanks for this, Arian! It has been given a new post.

Alex

That was my bad, I was inquiring more details from Mr. Rossi, about some further developments on the Home Depot news. All caps, makes it feel like someone is yelling at you.

http://www.electric-sailing.fi Pekka Janhunen

As I recall, Rossi typically uses capital letters when he wants to indicate that the message concerns a wider audience and not only the one who asked. It’s not about yelling or losing temper, but he just wants to get the readers’ attention into that message.

Lumen

Sounds like a fairly easy production task to me.
Simply send prints to 30,000 shops around the US and 60,000 in China for the different parts. Have them all shipped to the nearest assembly plant in China or US.
After 90 days, you have 2 million completed units.
Why does everyone always think everything is impossible?

PersonFromPorlock

Negotiating 90,000 separate contracts might be a bit of a chore.

Jonathan D.

Rossi is not likely running a Ponzi scheme because according to Wikipedia: “A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation.”
Rossi would be a fool to promise to deliver a product by a specific date and not be able to do so and have the whole thing blowup.

It doesn’t seem likely that he is running a SCAM. A scam artist generally tries to get as many uninformed people as possible to give him money as quickly as possible and then disappear. Rossi is not asking the thousands of people following this to send him money. Now, you might say he is only interested in big cat VCs with millions to invest. People who have millions to invest also have big-time lawyers and would have no problems tracking down a man as “out-there” as Rossi is.
Madoff ran his Ponzi/scam for decades and planned on it continuing for the rest of his life.
People run scams with products or services that can never be disproved. After Rossi sells the first ecat and it does not work, he will be in big trouble with no place to hide.

It could be that Rossi thinks that the ecat works, and it does not. But if that is the case, NI would not allow their name to be associated with him without debunking that allegation.

PersonFromPorlock

Rossi’s announcements have much in common with the Duke of York’s military tactics:

Oh, The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

Sparks

EUREKA!! I just invented a TIME MACHINE!! Folks, here’s what I can do for you: I’ll go forward in time, to sometime in the year 2015 (say), and check up on the progress of the E-Cat rollout, which should be quite thunderous by then. Then I’ll come back to the present, and post right here on this website, what I found. The fact that I’m posting such FUTURE information here will be PROOF that I traveled in time. Now there’s one hitch: I need donations to make this happen. I will need about $1 Million per year forward that I go on this journey. So 2015 will require about $3M. (The further out you go, the greater the flux density required, hence a greater control problem requiring more robust high-power components.) I can have the machine ready in 4 months, give or take. If it takes longer than that, I’ll just time-travel it back in time so that it didn’t. All I need is a little help from this website to gather the donations. What say, folks??

Wes

$1M/year works out to $115/hr. Suggestion: travel forward one hr. Make a call to the lottery line from your cell phone, get the winning lottery number. Travel back, buy the winning ticket.

BTW, my Mr. Portal Time System plans are available for only $150 (cash), should yours fail to do the trick. Mr. Portal demos will be held later in October. However there is no need to wait! Build Mr. Portal now and jump to the demo

Sparks

The lottery idea might work! Fortunately, I have a prepaid cellular plan that doesn’t expire for a year, so the cell phone should be good 1 hour out. Great input.

Kim

Andrea Rossi
January 5th, 2012 at 11:47 AM

Dear Bernie Koppenhofer:
Thank you for your suggestions, but be sure, we are a well fueled warship.
Warm Regards,
A.R.

Would this “well fueled warship be a Navy Contract???

Respect
Kim

blah

What’s the certification process? Will a unit be sent to UL? If that’s the case, regardless of the viability of Rossi’s business model, an independent 3rd party will tell us if it works or not.

blah

Actually, we’d know if the answer was yes, but not the opposite (no). If the 3rd party certifies it then we would get an affirmative answer. However, if the answer is no, then the 3rd party would likely be under contract not to divulge negative information. (Or maybe not;)

To be honest, the number and size of claims are now gone through the roof. He has 9 months to develop a product, get the certifications, set up a factory to produce a million units, produce those million units, set up a distribution chain, train installers, build a support team, hire an army of lawyers and so on and so forth.

It is a little strange that only one man is talking about the ecat out of the 7 billion.

No one else has come forward with confirmations that they are in talk with Rossi or have a contract to set up a factory or have an order for supply of raw material or are testing prototypes or have sold land for the factory or are processing the certification etc etc.

Given the size of the project, at least hundreds of people must be involved. The question is – where are they ?

I’m no skeptic, and have an open mind about this, but the time has come for serious investigative journalism, rather than simply quoting Rossi. Why no one is investigating?

http://none.com Charles Ponzi

Remember the Madoff fraud? There was a guy who told the SEC about it. The SEC ignored the warnings. If there is anything to learn from this it is not to expect the authorities to do anything until it is too late.

Given the scale of manufacturing that Rossi claims to have going, the $2 he got from the sale of the first ecat could not possibly cover the costs. Therefore he must have an investor or investors with deep pockets who are backing him. The way that this ponzi scheme works is he (and Defkalion) takes part of the money and reinvests it in operations that look and feel real. This the manufacturing and distribution effect. It sure looks and feels real. Doesn’t it? The more real it looks, without revealing any core science of course, the more investors with too much money it attracts.

All of these statements Rossi makes are not for you and me. We’re just little guys on the internet. They are supposed to attract new fresh capital into the pyramid.

Wes

So, Charles, are you saying this could be a…… Ponzi scheme?

Sorry, the comment was waiting to roll off someone’s keyboard, given your name!

Lu

It’s going to be messy that’s for sure. The biggest hurdle is the certification but if Rossi manages to get it then think about it. Rossi sends out 1 million E-cats and even if only 1% (i.e., 10,000) are successfully installed and operated he will establish the E-cat, LENR technology, and Leonardo Corp and a new age will be upon us.

There are many, many people in the world, including me, who want to be early adopters and will do the work to make it happen no matter what the obstacles. I certainly have my doubts about Rossi and Defkalion but the payoff is so huge and the cause for skepticism so minor that it’s worth watching carefully with an open mind.

Sparks

Spot on, Sanjeev. Not to mention: Set up supplier arrangements for feedstock to the factory, lease a factory, get permits in place for retooling and production, set up a corporation, set up HR and payroll processing, and employment certifications, set up employee benefits, gain OSHA certification, hire factory workers, develop training materials, train factory workers, jeez, I give up. I helped build a startup company once, a very small defense company, and it required 6 months of the day-and-night efforts of 4 experienced professionals and $2M right off the bat, plus we had some government contracts right off the bat to get the ball rolling. And that was basically a consulting firm, NOT a manufacturing company! Rossi should have said “two to three years” in order to be believable. This is what any venture capitalist knows. THE TIME HAS COME TO STOP THE TEASERS, PUT UP, OR SHUT UP, or Rossi will have lost his audience, except for the die-hard dreamers.

Wes

Not that hard really. 10,000 elves manufacturing two units each week (part time help – no benefits). 100 fairies delivering 27 units each day to resellers. 1,000 trolls installing 4 units/day. Harry Potter as general mgr. Doable.

Dear Mario:
When we will put for sale the 10 kW E-Cats ( presumably in Autumn 2012) the sales will be made worlwide by internet and by our licensees, the same day all over the world. Of course in the meantime we will have made all the necessary certifications.
We are organizing not only the production, but also the logistics for the distribution with specialists.
Warm Regards,
Andrea Rossi